TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

CLIENT: Hi.

THERAPIST: Hey.

CLIENT: I’m thinking about Bach on the way over here. There’s a sign that said, God I can’t remember the names of the church, it’s First Church I think, that has sort of a Bach and Brahms concept. That’s my favorite. I feel like everything Bach writes is really serene on some level. There’s a lot of emotion going on but there’s sort of a certainty that everything’s going to be okay. I really like that. All lady friends like. He’s just sort of ubiquitous in church music and he wrote so much church music and so, yes. [00:01:09]

Went to bed earlier last night, which was good. James and I were watching a movie again, which is also good. [inaudible at 00:01:37]. A friend of mine -

THERAPIST: Someone who [inaudible at 00:01:47]?

CLIENT: Yes, yes. I have a friend he lives in Los Angeles now but I sang in the choir with him when I was in San Antonio. And he writes so he did an interview with him this month. So that sort of prompted let’s do this again. It’s really good. [00:02:07]

[Pause]

Not the most interesting thing he’s written. I mean it’s a decent interview but, yes. Actually it was kind of tough for reasons that are not that clear. I can’t tell whether I was really irritable or the kids were just really irritating. [Laughs] Somewhere in there. Also they really sort of wanted me to play with them and interact with them pretty much constantly all day, which was very much the case when I started working there. And so they’ve just, they moved towards being far more, they’ll just play on their own a lot. And for whatever reason yesterday I was sort of, it was very draining to do that. [00:03:54]

I ended up for a good chunk of the day I had, I really wanted to self-injure, which hasn’t, I haven’t since mid-February and that sort of impulse has been less to the forefront. I think about it occasionally but it’s not the first place my mind goes. So that sort of troubled me. Yes. [00:04:44]

[Pause]

It feels like something that I might not be able to have control over and I feel like the important thing to do is to keep reminding myself that in fact I do have entire control over it; it’s just me. And so I don’t know, I don’t know. [00:05:38]

One way of thinking about it is really just wanting to be alone and take care of myself yesterday and that wasn’t really an option. And so Franco says okay here’s something that you have to take care of, so you have to think about this now. But, I don’t know. [00:06:29]

THERAPIST: Maybe you were feeling abandoned?

CLIENT: Kind of like sort of put upon but I don’t know. I don’t know. [Pause] I started reading this memorandum (ph) that I was talking about with James last week. The first chapter is about a doctor losing her mom to cancer and it’s this horrible story. She’s, the mother’s 45 and she’s a non-smoker. [00:07:35]

And she lives on this sort of like back to nature plot of land out in Iowa and doesn’t use any pesticides or anything and she has lung cancer. And by the time they catch it because it’s lung cancer there’s nothing you can do and she’s dead a month and half later. And that’s it. And so the author’s sort of describing just how much that sort of destroyed her and how huge that grief was. [00:08:17]

THERAPIST: When were you reading it?

CLIENT: I was reading it actually last night on the train home. And it’s just I don’t know I’m sort of jealous. I think I might have had the same experience when I read it before but I don’t really remember reading it before. I think not because of reading grievance but just because I don’t remember books that well. I just don’t have that. [00:09:13]

THERAPIST: What?

CLIENT: I don’t have the experience of having a parent who took care of me so well that I felt like I couldn’t exist without them.

THERAPIST: I see. The thing that this writer lost?

CLIENT: Yes. [Pause] Sometimes it’s just sort of a cool thing to say it seems. When somebody says it was worse having their parents be divorced than having one of my parents be dead because everyone kept telling me that my mom wasn’t gone. Or it feels like that was sort of the mentality around me; I don’t think everybody kept telling me that but it felt like I couldn’t get any acknowledgement that yes, no she’s just gone. I just woke up one day and she was gone. But I don’t know. [00:11:36]

[Pause]

I meant to look up a recipe and make [one of the kids’] (ph) dessert but I forgot. For Sharon (ph) peanut butter and jelly muffins. It’s really good. You put the jam right on the muffin when you bake it. [00:13:35]

James maybe gets actually why now. I can tell because I used it and it’s making me really, really anxious. [Pause] I want to say I hope we stay here. Actually any change would be good. It’s been this weird thing that we don’t have any stability that would continue to be here but we can’t afford to even get out of the city. And so I’ve just been in Denver and haven’t traveled pretty much anywhere for the last year. And so I’m feeling I’m both cut off from friends across the country and cut off in some ways from friends here because I can’t say I’m going to stay. [00:15:29]

THERAPIST: Whether or not you’ll stay.

CLIENT: Sure it sounds appealing [inaudible at 00:15:47].

THERAPIST: Yes, yes it does.

[Pause]

CLIENT: So I read something cool about organs the other day, church organs. So I mean one friend is a pretty fair musician who’s talking about listening to and [inaudible at 00:17:10] an organ asylum. It was just sort of boring; he wasn’t very impressed with it. And for me I don’t know anything about, I don’t know enough about music to be able to tell the difference between something that’s well played and something that’s poorly played. I mean I can tell when they don’t know what they’re playing but when it’s not rehearsed enough but I can’t tell the difference between a good interpretation and a poor interpretation. [00:17:36]

So I was asking another friend who’s a church organist about it and she said well you know part of it is what stops do they use. And so as it turns out none of the it’s not written into the music which types of sounds you should play when on the organ, which do you know how an organ works at all? Okay, I have a very vague sense. [00:18:03]

THERAPIST: I know it’s a big piano with pipes.

CLIENT: Yes, so it has big pipes and you pull out different stops to make so basically you can sound like pretty much any type of instrument depending on which pipes you use. You can have hundreds of different qualities of sound and those qualities aren’t written into the music; it doesn’t tell you which ones to use.

THERAPIST: At which there really is not one to one or even close to correspondence between the keys you’re playing and the sounds you’re going to get.

CLIENT: Yes or you can play the same piece and get a hundred different sounds depending on which ones you touch.

THERAPIST: I get it. As if you played the same notes on a piano or a violin or something.

CLIENT: Yes, so I did not know this and now I do, [laughs] which I guess explains why pianist or organists, why people who why people get so into because people get so into it.

THERAPIST: Into organs? [00:19:15]

CLIENT: Yes. I mean it’s clearly not that many people [laughing]. It’s sort of a ridiculous thing because you’re not really playing an instrument so much as like you’re playing a building. It takes a whole the reason that they’re in churches is because they have to be installed in a building. It’s a whole it’s a building space. And you have practice organs that so my grandparents had two full sized grand pianos and an organ and wherever they moved they had to find a room that was big enough for those. But that’s just a little bit bigger than a piano. [00:20:10]

THERAPIST: Right, I think I’ve seen those.

CLIENT: Yes, but the whole, the real thing is huge.

THERAPIST: I see. So it’s not sort of kind of sacrative (ph) but it’s so big that it has to be that big.

CLIENT: Yes, because it’s all based on how big the pipes have to be and some of them are 20 feet long and I think that’s why to make the really -

THERAPIST: Low tones. [00:20:32]

CLIENT: low tones, yes. But going back to Bach one of the things that I fear, learned about in this year was that the entire time he was composing he was the church organist. That was his main sort of area of what he was interested in. What he was composing for was mostly church music. [00:21:10]

THERAPIST: I see, the finest healing?

CLIENT: Yes. There’s a sort of, I don’t really know what to call it, but it’s called Lent Madness, it’s like March Madness but with saints. [Laughing] And they have a racket of different things to make the [inaudible at 00:21:39]. So Bach was one of them this year.

THERAPIST: A little different. How do you tell who’s, what like in March Madness it’s who wins the basketball game.

CLIENT: Yes, you just vote. They have a team of people who research them and write little bios of them and talk about stuff. But yes. [00:22:10]

THERAPIST: So it’s a saints popularity contest.

CLIENT: Basically. So you were saying you were feeling like a nerd yesterday so I wouldn’t worry so much about that.

[Laughter]

THERAPIST: Very reassuring.

[Pause]

CLIENT: My aunt Margaret, she’s my mom’s sister and she works with a psychologist and she’s an artist, she drives me nuts. She has posted two things on Facebook in the last two days and the first two little pictures. And the first was a cartoon of a guy goes to the doctor and he says doctor, I feel really bad. I feel really awful and I don’t really know why. And the doctor says okay well go home and meditate three times a day and eat well and exercise and give up all pesticides, eat only organic, blah, blah, blah, and then come back to me in a month. This is the thing that will fix everything. And I thought sometimes that’s the truth; sometimes you get lung cancer. [00:26:09]

That’s the first one. And the second one was be nice to your nieces and nephews; someday they’ll be the ones smuggling liquor into your nursing home. And she says Tanya, are you onboard with this? And I said sure. And I thought does she know that my grandparents on my other side were alcoholics? Probably not because both of them were actually putting pretty heavy pressure on their children to bring them liquor in the hospital before they were dying. I don’t know if anybody did; I feel like that one could go either way. That was their dependence. I don’t think she knows that. [00:27:04]

My dad has a great loyalty to Margaret. I think in large part because when he and my mom got divorced she basically picked him. She basically said I’m not going to make David out to be the bad guy and so I’m going to breach with my mom and her family and she was a friend to my dad after that. So the cynical side of me thinks that it’s both something he probably really needed and a really good occasion to have to cause a breach with her family. [00:28:08]

THERAPIST: If that’s what she was looking for you mean?

CLIENT: Yes, yes. [Pause] It’s funny. I don’t know how to [let down] (ph). I don’t know how [00:29:03]

THERAPIST: With Margaret?

CLIENT: With my parents getting divorced. I asked my dad a few months ago whether he knew that my mom was as depressed as she was when they got married. He said no, no I really didn’t. But then he said he wasn’t really comfortable talking about it on its own. It’s sort of like I wonder whether knowing more about it would sort of make a difference emotionally. I sort of think it probably wouldn’t. But maybe I don’t know. I don’t know.

[Pause]

THERAPIST: I do think that you have, I’ve sort of talked about it, some internal version of her that’s really a very positive one and that you feel very connected to. However much that had a basis in the reality of your interactions or not I don’t know. But I don’t know I think that release is somewhere where you and I are at though I’m not sure about specifics much more than that, I mean except that you seem to feel and been and be kind of overshadowed by grief. And also are feeling confused I think, unsure where you are. [00:32:10]

It seems possible to me that you’re feeling with me something, some part of the more positive version of her and your relationship with her from before she left. And that both makes you more able to be in touch with some of grief over her leaving and afraid I’m going to leave. [00:33:00]

CLIENT: That’ll be for [inaudible at 00:33:03].

[Pause]

THERAPIST: I’m having sort of more tentative thoughts maybe what you’re reading about which is I don’t know somehow I have the sense that you said you felt as though everybody was saying she’s not gone, she is still here; see your mom in the same way, whatever. And, which just wasn’t true I guess. And there’s some way that nobody helping you with how she left and that she left made it harder to keep in touch with what was good that had been there between you. Again how much that was in your mind or in the action’s the same. If somebody said [00:35:16]

CLIENT: Yes, it’s like not really getting any traction when I would say that things are different now. Sort of made me think well maybe things were always this way, does that make sense? Maybe things were always so distant.

THERAPIST: Yes. Sort of somebody saying yes the world kind of just ended for you.

CLIENT: Yes.

[Pause]

I was talking to Carter [and Nicole] (ph) a week or two ago and I was I mean I was just sort of talking about my family and I sort of told her what was going on there. And she said I don’t understand, I don’t understand leaving your kids. She said I don’t [00:37:33]

THERAPIST: She said ?

CLIENT: I don’t understand leaving your kids. I just don’t, I don’t understand it. I said yes, me neither. [Laughs] I don’t know. In some ways I do though. Thinking about what it was like being suicidal; in some ways I do. [00:38:17]

THERAPIST: What do you have in mind?

CLIENT: Just that the things that are important to you stop being important. There’s just nothing more important than wanting to die. There’s nothing that is, that can get in the way of that. The best you can do is to remember that used to be important to you sort of project that someday it will be again. But that’s really hard to do. [00:39:03]

THERAPIST: I have been thinking when you said you don’t get it either that it seems to me something that is already familiar to you is abetting yourself most of the time. What I have in mind is beating off how you feel or the way that something happened mattered to you or I’m thinking mostly in your own mind but sometimes with other people and certainly that said now I think that needs to be. [00:40:24]

And maybe that’s related to what you’re saying about suicide. I’m not thinking so much that that’s leading to but like you were saying about yesterday morning maybe that it’s a reaction to feeling like you can’t take care of yourself.

CLIENT: I don’t remember what I was thinking, it’s [inaudible at 00:40:58] anxiety.

THERAPIST: What you were saying today about yesterday morning. You were saying you had been thinking of cutting yourself and you haven’t been in a while. And it seemed, and you had the thought after saying that, do you know what I mean? [00:41:15]

CLIENT: Yes, yes.

THERAPIST: But actually it was a way of getting your own attention and keeping yourself focused on how upset you were.

[Pause]

CLIENT: Yes, that was sort of going in a different direction in terms of thinking well I think it’s very easy to think of children as extensions of your own personality. If you do that then it doesn’t seem, it seems to me to be much more okay to abandon myself and some stuff than to abandon somebody else. [00:42:25]

THERAPIST: I see. Your kid is some part of you, where if you went away -

CLIENT: Yes.

THERAPIST: I see.

CLIENT: I’m thinking that’s definitely how Mom feels about us.

THERAPIST: Yes that’s certainly how you’ve described her often demeanor. We should finish up now. It occurs to me do you I’m willing to look up the rest and you can write it down if you want.

CLIENT: Oh that’s okay. It’s not I can look it up at work.

THERAPIST: No problem. Got you. [00:43:42]

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